Natural Gas Storage Forecasts: Is the Crowd Wiser?

Abstract

This paper examines the usefulness of crowdsourced relative to professional forecasts for natural gas storage changes. We find that crowdsourced forecasts are less accurate than professional forecasts on average. We investigate possible reasons for this inferior performance and find evidence of a greater divergence of opinions and a lower incorporation of publicly available information among crowd analysts. We further show that crowdsourced consensus forecast does not influence the market’s expectation of gas storage changes beyond what is already contained in professional consensus forecast, suggesting that crowdsourced forecasts provide little new information. Overall, our results indicate that the incremental usefulness of crowdsourced forecasts for gas market stakeholders is very limited.